Photo by Sharee Jablonski from publicdomainpictures.net
Outside, rain lashed the windows, the sound of it making Laura feel cold. In the photo in front of her, though, warm sunshine beat on the smiling boy and girl and glowed on their messy hair. Laura smiled at the memory and put that photo in the “keep” pile.
The room was strewn with photo albums, letters and all sorts of bits and pieces, which had to be sorted into two categories: keep or chuck. Laura’s flight for Australia left the next day. Although she had packed what she was going to take with her, and the flat had been rented furnished, there were still plenty of things she had accumulated in her three years in London which she now either had to leave in her parents’ spare bedroom, or throw away. She picked up another photo, paper-clipped to a letter. This one was of her friend James on his own, not with Laura as in the last one. He was on some piece of military-style apparatus, and looked about ten.
Laura glanced at the letter. In large, childish script it told her how James was enjoying being away at camp: “I cant wait to show you all the cool stuff weve learned how to clime trees and every thing!” Laura laughed. It was funny – when you had grown up alongside someone, you didn’t notice them getting older, and then it seemed astonishing that they, or you, had ever been so much younger. It was hard to imagine intellectual, English Literature graduate James ever making a spelling mistake now!
Looking at the photos around her, Laura noticed how many of them either featured James, or had been taken by James on Laura’s sturdy wind-on camera. Not all of the photos were sunny, but apart from the odd snow scene they had almost all been taken in summer. That was when Laura and James and the other neighbourhood kids were free to go mad in the woods and recreation ground, and Laura, it seemed, had usually had the camera handy. Through the photos the little boy and girl aged, and scenes of mud, grass and trees were replaced by scenes of cafés and town centres. The smiles became less beaming and more “ironic,” but Laura remembered that despite her teenage need to be cool, she and her friends had still had a great time. James by this time had become a bit of a know-it-all, a pain to be in a class with, but in the summer he turned his cleverness to making Laura laugh, and to impressing surprised adults with his knowledge and politeness. The adults then often treated James and Laura better than the other teenagers who came into the shop or café or whatever it was, and Laura remembered being grateful for many a free extra biscuit, or extra time in the swimming baths, courtesy of James.
Laura got up to stretch out her stiff limbs. She leaned against the window and looked at the rain pummeling the closed heads of the newly emerged daffodils below. Soon summer would he here, but she would be far away in Australia, where it would be autumn, heading into winter. This one-year post in Australia would be great for her career, but she wasn’t sure how she could handle two winters on the trot. She knew that it also meant two summers together when she came back, but that seemed so far away.
Laura picked up another picture of James. It was a seaside snap that he had sent her. A skinny, pale James grinning at her from some Spanish beach, long baggy shorts a token of his teenage shyness. The sight of James’ skinny chest made Laura laugh again. He looked nothing like that now! He had really filled out after school, and while he wasn’t exactly Poldark, he still had a pretty nice body. Startled by the thought, Laura put the photo down between the two piles. When had she started thinking of James in that way?
“He’s just James!” she said to herself. Maybe it was because she hadn’t seen him in so long that she was starting to think of him as a man, rather than as just James
The beach photo, like the camp photo, had been sent to her because they had been apart during the summer. Even when they weren’t together they had made sure they shared their experiences by writing and sending photos. Now, messages and photos were the sum total of their friendship. It didn’t seem right after such a close relationship all their lives, but she and James had hardly seen each other since university. Part of the tragedy of growing up, she supposed. That beach holiday had probably been a summer or two before university. Their separate universities had not been close to one another, so it was in the three-month summer holidays that their friendship had been played out. They had spent endless days and weeks back in their home town, doing nothing and complaining about having no money, or finding summer jobs and complaining about the jobs. James was a great listener, for a man, and always knew a quote that suited any situation perfectly – the more so, since he had been studying English Literature. He had written a Bible quote on her Christmas card this year, Laura remembered, Proverbs or something.
James was much better about keeping in touch than Laura was. He had sent her a Christmas card without fail every year for as long as she could remember. Sometimes he sent silly little mementoes – an old annual he had found in a jumble sale with a picture of a pop star Laura had liked when she was ten, or a postcard he knew would make her laugh. Laura always emailed to thank him, and intended to write more regularly or to meet up, but somehow life got in the way of her good intentions. It looked as if the two best friends were destined to end up nothing more than pen pals – or even less. She hadn’t heard a single word from James since the last Christmas card, in fact. The thought made Laura feel very low, and she distracted herself by diving back into her sorting.
There was the very card she had been thinking about, in the pile of Christmas cards still untouched from when she had taken them down in January. She dug it out. It was beautiful, as she had remembered. A snow-covered path by moonlight, designed to remind her, she knew, of a wonderful Christmas party they had once gone to when it had snowed on the way home. She looked inside. There, in James’ familiar, fluid writing, was the quote. Proverbs 27 verse 5. It was probably a good wish for the future, something about blessings. She had meant to look it up when she had got it, but had been too busy with the rush of Christmas and had never got round to it. She walked over to her pile of books and picked up her Bible. Flicking to the right spot, she scanned until she found the verse. Then she gave a gasp, and the blood rushed to her face. The verse read: “Better is open rebuke than hidden love.”
Laura sank back against the wall, overwhelmed by confusion and regret. She knew James too well to mistake his meaning. This had been his one and only declaration of his feelings, and she had never even known. She had dashed off a card in reply in her usual jokey style, without any acknowledgement of his message. No wonder she hadn’t heard from him since then; he must have assumed that she could never see him that way. But could she ever see him that way? She looked at the “keep” pile, full of photos of James, letters from him, silly mementoes. She knew the answer. It was as if she had been asleep and had just this moment woken up.
“What have I done? Is it too late?”
Laura trembled as she hurriedly went through the rest of the pile, putting the “chuck” stuff into black bags and the “keep” into boxes, and she was still preoccupied during the long drive to her parents’ house. It was already dark when she got there, a reminder that winter was only barely over. Her emotional state didn’t seem strange to her parents; she was going to Australia the next day, after all. They were quite emotional themselves.
After dinner, Laura crept to the phone and looked up the number for James’ old house. No reason why he would be there now, but she had to get in contact somehow and waiting for a reply to an email would be torture. It was James’ mother who answered it.
“Is that Laura? Goodness, I haven’t heard that voice in ages! What can I do for you?”
“I don’t have James’ current mobile number,” Laura replied. “Could you let me have it?”
“Of course, just let me look it up,” said James’ mum.
After hanging up, Laura punched the number into her own mobile with stiff fingers. What do you say to a friend you haven’t seen in over a year? What do you say to a man who told you he loved you months ago, but you never realised? She didn’t have a chance to answer the questions because James’ phone was turned off. Dispirited, Laura crept off to bed to get a few hours’ sleep before her Dad took her to the airport.
The rush of getting to the airport, checking in and saying goodbye to her parents occupied Laura’s mind the next morning so that she didn’t have time to think too much about James. Soon she found herself filing along the corridor into the plane that would take her to her second winter this year. She found her seat, then took out her phone to switch it off. Her finger hovered above the off button, then moved to last number called, and pressed dial.
“Hello, this is James, please leave a message.”
“James,” she said, “this is Laura. I’m on a plane; I’m going to Australia for a year. I know this is a stupid time to tell you, but I finally looked up that quote from Proverbs, and if you’re asking if I feel the same – well, yes, I do.”
She hung up quickly and turned off the phone, ignoring the curious look from the passenger next to her.
The journey seemed to last a lifetime. Laura managed to sleep through a lot of it, but not enough to stop her being bored out of her mind. Eventually they came to a stop, but only for refueling in Indonesia. At least it gave her a chance to get off the plane and get some circulation back in her legs. She debated turning her phone on. What if he hadn’t replied? What if he had changed his mind?
“I should leave it ’til I won’t have hours to stew over it,” she told herself.
But she couldn’t stand it, and turned it on. It took a while to register the local network, then came the bleep of a message. Hastily she opened it. It read:
“Shakespeare sonnet 116. And since I now know you’re rubbish at looking up quotes – Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark which looks on tempests and is never shaken … Love alters not with time’s brief hours and weeks (or year, in this case), But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
Laura understood her old friend, and smiled. A long journey still awaited her, and after that a second winter, but that seemed insignificant now. The man she loved had told her he would wait for her, and afterwards there would be a second summer full of new memories, with James.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I am an author mainly of young adult fiction and short fiction. My two collections of short stories, Office Life (and Death) and A New Year’s Trio, are available on Amazon as e-books and paperbacks. My very popular short story e-book, Running for Cover, is also available free on Smashwords in various formats. I have written a couple of YA novels (one of which, Leda, is available from bookshops) and a couple of biographies of famous Christians for young people (Augustine the Truth Seeker and Patrick: The Boy Who Forgave). I have also had short stories published in a number of magazines and anthologies.
I write non-fiction, too. You may have seen some of my articles in Christianity magazine or on the now-defunct Suite 101. I also regularly write Sunday school materials for Go Teach. Do check out the blog for flash fiction, reviews, rants, musings on the Christian life, and whatever else pops into my head.
Check out my website: kcmurdarasi.com
June/July 2017 Issue 